Lincoln points out that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a generation of Native Americans were coming of age who were the first of their respective tribal communities to receive a substantial English-language education, particularly outside Indian boarding schools, and with more graduating from colleges and universities. Conditions for Native people, while still very harsh during this period, had moved beyond the survival conditions of the early half of the century.

A period of historical revisionism was underway, as historians were more willing to look at difficulties in the history of the invasion and colonization of the North American continent. As they explored the colonial and "Wild West" eras, some historians were more careful to represent events from the Native American perspective. This work inspired public interest in Native cultures and within Native American communities themselves; it was also a period of activism within Native American communities to achieve greater sovereignty and civil rights.

The ferment also inspired a group of young Native American writers, who emerged in the fields of poetry and novel-writing. In the span of a few years, these writers worked to expand the Native American literary canon.

Although the primary use of the term has been literary, it has been used in a wider sense to describe "an increasing prosperity and sense of achievement among Indians [...] a widespread economic and cultural rebirth."[3] For example, Joan Nagel applies the term to the totality of "the resurgence of American Indian ethnic identification and the renascence of tribal cultures during the 1970s and 1980s."[4]

John Gamber argues that the characteristics of Renaissance writers are as follows: devotion to a sacred landscape; a homing-in plot, often associated with a protagonist's return to the reservation; the treatment of a mixed-blood protagonist's dilemma between two worlds as a central theme.[5] Erika Wurth points out that writers of this period were often concerned with writing for a non-Native audience.[6] Wurth and Gamber both agree that a new phase in Native writing began with the works of writers such as Sherman Alexie, who rejected many of the formal and thematic concerns of Renaissance-era writing.

The term Native American Renaissance has been criticized on a number of points. As James Ruppert writes, "Scholars hesitate to use the phrase because it might imply that Native writers were not producing significant work before that time, or that these writers sprang up without longstanding community and tribal roots. Indeed, if this was a rebirth, what was the original birth?"[7] Other critics have described it as "a source of controversy,[8]". Rebecca Tillett argues that "While the definition of the recent burgeoning of Native writing as a "renaissance" is highly accurate in its description of the sudden growth in the numbers of Native writers finding publication, it is also profoundly inaccurate in its tendence to obscure the often specifically political histories of Indian oratory and writings upon which many Native writers are drawing."[9]